Gammel climbs out of the pool and finishes competitive career.
The Calgary Herald

One of Canada’s top female backstroke specialists threw in the towel on Wednesday and announced her retirement from competitive swimming. Erin Gammel, originally from Barriere, B.C., leaves the sport with a resume decorated with an Olympic appearance, a decade’s worth of experience on Canada’s national swim team and numerous Canadian Interunversity Sport accomplishments.

The 27-year old, who calls Calgary her home, had recently wrapped up her final year of eligibility by spending the 2006-07 season with the University of Calgary Dinos swim team. “I’ve kind of been on the verge a couple times, every year,” said Gammel. “It’s not like I didn’t like the sport anymore. It just felt like I’m moving into a new phase which, I really am.”

Although Gammel will continue her communications and English studies at the U of C and graduate in December, she’s set to tie the knot with fiancee Stew Therrien on Sept. 1. “Honestly, (the decision to get married was) when it all started,” added Gammel. “It was just time, and I wanted to make sure (retiring) was something that I didn’t think about and cry. “Now, I can sit here and be proud of what I did. I did what I wanted to and reached my goals but at the same time, could leave the sport still loving it and being excited about the rest of my life.”

Gammel had returned to the Dinos in 2006-07 after taking a two-year hiatus in 2004, her fourth year of university, to train with the national team full-time. At the 2005 world championship trials, she set a national record of one minute, 1.93 seconds in the 100-metre backstroke, and posted a win in the 50m backstroke at 29.5 seconds. Fulfilling one of her major goals, Gammel competed at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. She also won a 100m bronze medal at the world short-course swimming championships in 1999.

“You think of all the thoughts that go through your mind, how nervous you get,” said Gammel. “It depends on how everybody deals with it and for me, that was one of the hardest parts. “Going into a race, knowing that you’ve done everything, and then for some reason, something doesn’t work out and it’s all because of something that you couldn’t control.

“This past year, I made it my goal to go to (CIS nationals) and do everything I possibly could to have fun and stay happy and not worry so much about my performances. “It worked better,” she chuckled. “So that’s another good note to retire on is that I somewhat figured it out.”

Gammel, coached by U of C’s Jan Bidrman and Mike Blondal, was a triple gold medallist at the 2004 CIS championship and was named the national varsity female swimmer of the year in 2004. At the end of February, she earned the same award at the 2007 CIS swimming championship in Halifax and chipped in with two gold medals for the Dino women’s second-place overall finish.

Cools turns up the heat at new track; Albertan a medal favourite for this summer’s worlds.
Times Colonist (Victoria)

The star rider from Airdrie, Alta., with her gravity-defying bicycle jumps, could turn the CBC acronym into the Cools Broadcasting Corporation this summer at Juan de Fuca and next year at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

Samantha Cools might make it to become a Canadian TV sports star if she lands on the podium at the 2007 world BMX championships this summer at the new Worlds Legacy Track at Juan de Fuca and again next year at Beijing, where the sport makes its Olympic debut.

Both the Victoria worlds and Beijing Olympics BMX races will be broadcast on CBC, with the Mother Corporation showing portions of live world championships coverage from Juan de Fuca July 26-29 on Country Canada with a tape-delay show from the worlds to follow after the event on Sports Weekend.

Cools, the six-time Canadian champion and ranked No. 6 in the world, capped off her weekend rides at the UCI Continental Cup with a silver-medal placing yesterday in the women’s elite race. Cools won gold at a major UCI (International Cycling Union) event last weekend in Prunedale, Calif.

The UCI Continental Cup, featuring some of the best BMX riders in North America, opened the new track at Juan de Fuca and served as the test event for the upcoming 2007 world championships and Olympic trials.“This is just one more step to the worlds and Olympics,” said Cools, of the Continental Cup. “It’s an amazing facility here [at Juan de Fuca] and it’s incredible to have this track in our own country.”

Christine Miller and Patrick Lebel, both of Alberta, were fifth in their respective elite women’s and men’s finals yesterday. Top elite British Columbians were Nick Goertzen of Langley and Scott Erwood of Surrey, who were seventh and eighth in men’s.

The only Canadian medal other than Cools’ came through 18-year-old Albertan Jimmy Brown’s bronze medal in the junior men’s competition.

Cools gives Canada a legitimate women’s medal threat and Miller an outside chance for Victoria 2007 and Beijing 2008 while Brown, Lebel, Goertzen and Erwood gave national team head coach Tanya Dubnicoff some encouragement on the men’s side. “Our elite men have been struggling,” noted Dubnicoff. “But it’s always a good boost to have the world championships at home and we’re really looking forward to that this summer.”

Canadian Zelinka fourth in heptathlon.
Canadian Press, Associated Press

Goetzis, Austria—Canadian Jessica Zelinka finished fourth in the Hypo Meeting heptathlon yesterday, missing out on bronze by 23 points. The London, Ont., native picked up 6,343 points, a personal best that left her just back of German Jennifer Oser’s 6,366. Olympic champion Carolina Kluft of Sweden won the heptathlon, edging Lyudmila Blonska of Ukraine by 55 points. Andrei Krauchanka held off Olympic champion Roman Sebrle and world champion Bryan Clay to win the decathlon.

Zelinka, who concluded her remarkable University of Calgary track and field career by being named the Canadian varsity system’s female athlete of the year on April 30, will appear in the May 28 issue of Sports Illustrated as part of its regular Faces in the Crowd feature.

SI reports: “Zelinka, a fifth-year student at Calgary, is Canadian Interuniversity Sport’s athlete of the year. At the CIS track championship she won gold medals in the pentathlon, 60-meter hurdles, shot put, long jump and ran the anchor leg of the 4x400 relay, leading the Dinos to a national team title.”

A specialist in the heptathlon who won 17 medals at four CIS championships, Zelinka is aiming for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. After this weekend, she will go directly from Austria to Arles, France for the next leg of the Challenge to defend the gold medal she won at that meet in 2006.  Also on her docket this summer are the Canadian track and field championships at Windsor, Ont., the Pan American Games at Rio de Janeiro and the IAAF world championships in Osaka, Japan.

The May 28 issue of North America’s leading sports publication hits the newstands late this week.

David Kikuchi and Kristina Vaculik win national all around titles.
Canadian Sport News

REGINA- Veteran David Kikuchi of Halifax and rising star Kristina Vaculik of Oshawa, Ont., each captured a second straight national all around title on Thursday at the Canadian gymnastics championships.

Vaculik took the gold with to add the senior all around women’s crown to the junior title she won last year.  Stephanie Pacitto of Mississauga, Ont., was second while Marcie Bernholtz of Richmond Hill, Ont., and Sydney Sawa of Calgary tied for third.

‘’I’m bit surprised to do this well,’’ said Vaculik, who produced medal performances at senior meets in France and Montreal earlier this year and won the Elite Canada all around senior event in December.  ‘’The highlight for me was my beam routine.  I fell on it the day before and today I was able to stick the whole routine.’’

Vaculik’s coach Elena Davydova says there is no secret to Vaculik’s success.‘’She works very hard,’’ said Davydova.  ‘’When you do that, good things will happen.  I was impressed with how she fought through her uneven bars routine.  She made some mistakes but she didn’t fall apart and cameback strong.’’

Kikuchi was particularly pleased with his performances on rings and parallel bars for the men’s all around title.  Grant Golding of Calgary, the 2004 champion, was second and Ken Ikeda of Abbotsford, B.C., third.  All three medallists were on the 2004 Olympic team and last year’s world championship team that placed a best-ever sixth.

‘’I was really happy with how I did,’’ said Kikuchi, a top-three all around finisher at every nationals since 2002.  ‘’I hit all my routines.  It’s an excellent first step towards the world championships.  The big difference at nationals this year is that we did the competition in two consecutive days.  Usually we had a day’s rest.  So I changed my preparation a bit today by not spending as much time warming up.’’

Canadian skiers putting pedals to the medals.
The Toronto Star

The drudgery of the weight room for members of the Canadian Alpine ski team will give way to the pristine majesty of the Rocky Mountains as they cycle from Lake Louise, Alta., to Whistler, B.C., site of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Summer can be long, hot and boring for a winter athlete. The conditioning never stops but it can also become mundane. “As athletes, we’re not often presented with new challenges. I know it sounds crazy, but we often train a very similar way all the time,” said Allison Forsyth, who at 28, is the oldest skier in the training. “This is taking us completely out of our comfort zones as athletes and as people. We train biking quite a bit but nothing of this level or calibre.”

The skiers are scheduled to leave today from Lake Louise and arrive at Whistler, home of the 2010 Alpine events, 1,000 kilometres away, on June 2. The terrain, although beautiful, is gruelling and considered to be a good way of getting ready for the next ski season. “It’s going to make us dig really deep, but you know with our training, there’s a lot of monotony. It’s just a repetition of skiing and squats and stuff,” Emily Brydon said. “It’s going to be huge - working together as a team and helping each other.”

Team building is a major factor the skiers believe is necessary if Canadian athletes are going to win more medals in 2010. It’s also something that skiers, who usually compete head-to-head with teammates, don’t get to experience very often. “We are a close team that has to compete against each other on race day and that’s hard mentally to handle sometimes,” Forsyth said. “This is a great opportunity for us just to know you have to literally rely on a teammate to get to the finish line. We’ve seen it in ski racing time after time when one teammate does well, the rest of the team follows.”

After a couple of weeks of leisure time the thought of getting back into the swing of things suits most of the skiers just fine. “You can feel the giddy excitement of a new challenge,” Forsyth said with a chuckle. “I think it’s a great team bonding experience,” Scott Barrett said. “It will be definitely difficult, but we’ll get through it as a team.” The cyclists/skiers are expected to travel a minimum of 100 kilometres each day.

Our ambassadors of hope; Canadian Olympians travelled to Rwanda with humanitarian group Right To Play to help youngsters.
The Toronto Star by Randy Starkman

Olympic moguls champion Jennifer Heil tried futilely to explain freestyle skiing to a Grade 6 class in Rwanda that’s never seen snow.

Finally, she dashed back to the bus that brought her and fellow Canadian athletes Hayley Wickenheiser, Kristina Groves and Arne Dankers to a little village north of the capital city Kigali. She grabbed the small photo album she prepared for the trip to Africa with the humanitarian group Right To Play.

The kids were enthralled with the pictures of Heil skiing, doing a backflip off a mogul, and also at home with her family - “Is that you?” they asked repeatedly. One young girl was particularly mesmerized. She stayed behind after everyone else left, clutching the photos in her hands and scanning them over and over again before finally handing them to Heil. “I really like what I see,” she said, before skipping off to join her friends at recess.

That sentiment was shared by Heil, Wickenheiser, Groves and Dankers after their five-day trip to Rwanda earlier this month to visit firsthand some of the programs they’ve been supporting for years as Right To Play ambassadors.

The four athletes were chosen by Right To Play because of the commitment they’ve shown to the Toronto-based charitable organization. Part of the idea in sending them was that they’d become even more dedicated once they were out in the field.

Consider that objective accomplished. “They’re empowering kids, many of them orphans and street children, to better their lives and giving them hope, even training some of them to be mentors and coaches to other children,” said Wickenheiser, the world’s premier female hockey player. “They’re not giving them anything. They’re not building them anything or giving them something material. But they’re giving them education. To me, it’s so powerful what they’re doing.”

Right To Play uses sports to improve the lives of children in the most disadvantaged places in the world. They send volunteer instructors to set up programs, where they train local teachers and coaches to run them. The games, many of which feature the organization’s signature red ball, are used to strengthen the community and also teach the kids about such things as HIV-AIDS. “I saw so many times at the places we visited that when it was time to do the red ball activities these kids come alive, they become energized, they become more focused,” said Wickenheiser.

“So many of these kids are 10 going on 20, they’ve had to deal with so many things in their life. To have those brief moments in the day to just be kids is probably the greatest thing that Right To Play does.”

Visiting a country that is still struggling to recover and rebuild from the genocide in 1994, the Canadian athletes weren’t quite sure what to expect. “I was pretty nervous to see that and to experience that pain,” said Heil. “I only know what I see on the news and it is a pretty negative picture. And there are a lot of problems over there for sure. But I really left with so many positive emotions. It was really the opposite of what I was thinking I was going to experience.”

Heil met a young man named Yves whose eight brothers and sisters were murdered in front of him - he escaped by playing dead but later tried to commit suicide. He’s now a pastor, volunteering three times a week at a community centre to teach kids singing, dancing and poetry and also leads Right To Play games. “I’ve never felt so much love come out of an individual,” said Heil. “That really struck me. It gave me a lot of power. For someone to be able to overcome that and to give off so much positive emotion when we have so much to be thankful for and sometimes we just get caught up. I was really, really touched by his story.”

The athletes set up a fundraising component to their trip entitled the “Rwanda Challenge,” where they’re trying to raise $100,000, one dollar for each kilometre the quartet travelled (righttoplay.com). They’ve collected about $17, 000 to date and are making a push to create awareness. Even the somewhat media shy Groves called up CBC Radio on her own to cajole them into an interview. “The people there were just so open and warm and I think that touched all of us in ways that we didn’t expect,” said Groves, who is contemplating going overseas as a volunteer instructor once her speed skating career is over.

Wickenheiser said one of their visits was to an educational centre for street kids between 13 and 17 who are taught a skill such as carpentry or tailoring during the day but return to live on the street at night.

“You look at every single one of them and you know they’re all orphans and you know that probably 99 per cent of them lost their families in the genocide, “ said Wickenheiser. “Seeing that and imagining that sadness for them and then seeing them in the red ball games and doing some of the dancing, you see a lot of hope and possible opportunity for them as well.
“There was that constant contrast between complete unimaginable devastation and horror for these kids and then on the other side of it, the hope for the future they have and the peace they’re now able to live in. That was constant. You wrestled with that the entire time in your own mind.”

In the end, it was a sense of hope that shined through for the athletes. “Going there you really see that a lot of people doing little things can make a difference,” said Heil. “It doesn’t have to be the biggest and grandest. But every little bit helps. And we saw that.”

Pedalling with purpose; Kucera honours mentor during Alpine team bike trek from Lake Louise to Whistler.
The Calgary Sun

The road to Whistler will be a long one for every member of the Canadian Alpine Ski team.
To prove the point, they’re about to bike it.

As part of a team-bonding/training exercise that also serves as a symbolic journey to the site of the 2010 Olympics, 20 members of the squad will depart Lake Louise this morning for a 10-day, 1,000-km ride to the west coast winter playground.

This following a banner season in which the team won 13 medals and returned Canada to a serious threat on the World Cup circuit. And while several skiers admit the exercise will be a gruelling test of strength and will, Calgary’s John Kucera sees it more as a tribute to his fallen friend, mentor and coach, Jason Lapierre.

“He’s going to be rolling with me on this one,” smiled Kucera yesterday at COP, where he and his teammates launched their Summerstart Tour of Champions. “He’s a huge part of my life, he’s my mentor in the sport and life basically and he’s one of my best friends so I think about him a lot. He’s the one who actually got me into road biking—it was his passion—so it’s going to be cool to do this ride.”

Lapierre was killed last July while cycling along Hwy 1A outside Cochrane where the 34-year-old was struck by a passing motorist who had suffered a stroke and veered into him. Months earlier Kucera leaned heavily on Lapierre, his former coach at the Calgary Alpine Racing Club, to help rebound from a disappointing showing at the Turin Olympics. Despite missing some of a training camp in Chile to give the eulogy and a nine-minute slide presentation at ‘Lapp’s’ memorial at COP, the Bishop Carroll grad built on his pal’s inspiration and guidance to rebound with a breakthrough season on the World Cup circuit. Dedicating his first career win to Lapierre—a stunning, season-opening win at Lake Louise—Kucera went on to help the team post its best season in history.

“He’s a big part in everything that’s happened in my career,” said Kucera, 22, whose bike features a sticker with Lapierre’s name on it and a front tire formerly used by the longtime coach. He’ll also wear an outfit given to him by J-Force Triathlon team, made up of friends honouring Lapierre.

“We did a ride from Jasper to Banff a few years ago with my old club and we spent a chunk of it riding together. I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts of him throughout the ride. It’ll be emotional on that front, I’m sure, but it’ll be good.”

Along the way the ski squad will make stops for several community fundraisers including a barbeque and soccer game with the Jasper ski club. “At first, I was really excited, then I got nervous, then I drove it and got really, really nervous,” laughed women’s team veteran Emily Brydon. “It’s symbolic because we’re taking the road to Whistler but it’s more about the dynamics within the team and helping one another work together as a group.”

A somewhat surprising member of the road crew is Canmore’s Allison Forsyth, who was given medical clearance last week to resume skiing following four knee surgeries stemming from a crash in Turin. “Don’t tell anyone because I have a reputation to uphold but I’m looking forward to the ride,” laughed Forsyth, 28, who plans on skiing through 2010. “It’s a life experience and an opportunity to come together as a group. We will be the No. 1 alpine nation in Vancouver and to do that we need to be ridiculously fit.”

No one knew that better than Lapierre and his proud student, Kucera.